Variations on a Religious Theme

In the past couple of months, I've made a photographic study of the Forks of Cheat Baptist Church in Stewartstown, WV. 

Like my favorite hill behind the Dent's Run Covered Bridge, I've had a particular affinity to the composition of the landscape.  And unlike previous shots, I actually got a tiny bit of sky color when I shot it on November 4th.

Perhaps it's because of the two coal-fired electricity generation plants that are in the valley behind this hill, but it's been hard to catch this scene with any sort of clear sky.
 
Also, on that same date, I had brought along my Yashica MAT-120 TLR film camera.  This is an uncropped B&W shot from the 2x2 film.

This time, I used a tripod to steady the shot.   Other shots from close up weren't so exciting.  And they only got worse from here:

A couple of weeks later, on Nov. 23, I took another drive out in that direction.  Those shots were also quite nice.  I managed to get even more blue sky:

That one is probably a "keeper."  I like the long shadows case by the late afternoon November sun.

Roller Girl

Last Saturday, I got to sample our local Jingle Brawl multi-league roller derby tournament.  Took my camera (of course) but made the mistake of restricting myself to only one lens (of course).
Still, it was a fun challenge to shoot in a dimly lit arena with a telephoto lens.  This might have been the first time that I shot at strictly shutter priority.

I quickly discovered that it was foolish to try to shoot for high-quality 100 ISO images.

Here's a shot that I liked for overall composition:

I shot that at ISO 400, 1/30 sec at f/4.0.

Later on, I tried to shoot action shots by matching the sweep of my camera with the speed of the skater.  From a lot of shots, I came up with a few keepers.

That one was one of my personal favorites.  Shot at ISO 800, 1/30 sec at f/4.0  Look at how drawn out the faces in the crowd are as I "stopped" the skater in motion.

In the post-processing, I also tried out some Black and White shots.  Here's another one shot at ISO 800, 1/30 sec at f/4.0.

The following was shot at ISO 1600, 1/40 sec at f/4.5:

It's a picture of a "jammer" breaking away from the pack.